love this walk-around video with John Free. great philosophy on taking things as they come, not trying to force situations, being patient/ever ready, and injecting your own life experiences into your work.

I ended up going with a Nikon D5300 and, after consulting with a friend who has worked at Central Camera for a number of years, a 50-mm prime lens. He said the kit lenses were fine but recommended starting with something that would, to a certain degree, force me to learn the nuts and bolts. (I'm not paraphrasing him well, but you get the drift.) I'm anxious to try it out now.

A prime will help you understand the relationship of aperture to depth of field. I am guessing 50mm f/1.8? That's where most people start out with. They are inexpensive and prevalent. Keep in mind when you hear people talk, that the d5300 uses a cropped sensor (APS-C), factored at 1.5. That means the field of view is equivalent to 75mm (50mm * 1.5). 50mm was ultimately too tight for me, so I then went to a 30mm lens (Canon 1.6 crop = 48mm).

I would recommend starting out in an aperture priority mode, auto ISO. Take note of what the camera selects in general terms. You should then (when you feel comfortable) be able to take those numbers over to the fully manual mode and reproduce the same exposure. Slight adjustments to shutter speed and ISO will illustrate the relationship. It is a three legged stool we are trying to balance: Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO/Film Speed.

A lot of lenses have a limited field of view, and cannot be put onto cameras with a large sensor. It isn't easier to make medium format equipment, but the wide field of view due to much less cropping is the big advantage, but it does require a lens designed around a wide field of view.

If one puts a lens designed for a small sensor onto a camera with a large sensor, this is the result: vignetting

The advantage of a camera with a small sensor is you can use pretty much any lens without worrying about vignetting, but the disadvantage is that it's rather like using a telescope, have to be miles away from the subject.

A 50mm lens on a micro 4/3rds camera is equivalent in field of view to something like a 200mm lens on a medium format.

However, that can in some ways be an advantage, since very long lenses (zoom) can be very expensive. This as much as size is why photojournalists, sports photographers, wildlife photographers and paparazzi have traditionally used 35mm film cameras — they're often looking for a telescope effect and the ability to work at a distance. A 1000mm lens for a medium format is big, heavy and very expensive.

Working indoors with a subject and trying to get a wide angle, a lot of zoom due to crop factor at a relatively short focal length is not an advantage.

That's really the root of my disagreement with 35mm, it's always a bit like using binoculars.

_____

The fundamental problem is the physics of it, the bigger the sensor & the wider the field of view, the physically more massive the lens has to be.

At the extreme of high-resolution from the past, spy-planes were using chunks of film two foot square, which is incredibly high detail. What's more, that quality couldn't be beaten, so they were still in use, but now the military is using 1000s of drones where one spy plane used to do, and harvesting 3d data, so they're obsolete and were sold off a couple of years ago. The lenses for those cameras were several million dollars in the 1950s, but came up on sale on ebay for under a thousand dollars! I had to restrain myself from acquiring one and building an ultra-bright event-scale 4k projector using a 24" monitor element and a carbon-xenon bulb designed for stadium lighting (which I refrained from doing because I was rather concerned the screen element would catch fire even with active cooling.).

It's nigh on impossible to find a lens that will image out to a sensor or emitter 24 inches across (which is why you don't see screen technology being adapted for video projectors.)

Am very glad that they got into private hands, and that they're being used as-is for analogue photography, but certainly those plate cameras are what one would call a size & weight problem:

Last edited by bishopdante on Wed Apr 06, 2016 12:31 pm, edited 4 times in total.

"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision." - Bertrand Russell

If you're just starting, buy a good quality serviced, inexpensive 35 mm rangefinder with a normal lens (yashica, konica etc), a flatbed scanner with film holders, a brick of arista 200 and 400 and either some rodinal or HC-110, fixer, and fotoflow and a processing tank. It'll all cost less than a mediocre dslr, you'll learn far more, and you'll have hardcopy archives that will last 80+ years without worrying about hard drives.

There is a way to get colour using black & white film, though. I've wanted to build a rig to do prism-split RGB photography using 3x black & white camera backs for a while. Video projectors have the optical parts in them prefabricated (called a dichroic cube), so it's not necessarily as hard as one might think, probably just a question of a precision-machined lens bracket with a cube in it and a few corrective lenses to sort the focal length. Easier said than done.

^ dichroic cubes come in different sizes but all do the same job, a little one and a big one are pictured above.

Splitting optically into primary colours enables colour photograpy using mono film, and it was how the first forays into colour photography were done in the mid to late 19th century.

Not the easiest job to build such a rig, but I believe it would be the ultimate colour quality & resolution. It'd be somewhat on the big & heavy side.

There are also ways that one could use a single piece of film wrapped around a dichroic cube that would allow an RGB camera that took black & white film to be designed. I still wonder why nobody built a commercial one.

______

Employing a colour-splitting prism and 3X black & white industrial CCD cameras is also probably a good way to build a high-resolution motion-picture camera, also. There's all sorts of mono industrial cameras available.

It is dead easy to do an R/G/B method using colour filters over the lens for a still life using a camera by just advancing the film three times. For ultra-high-quality blowups of building-sized prints I used to use that trick years back — black and white film has a lot of detail.

RGB is also much more accurate colour than colour film, which distorts colour anywhere from a little to a hell of a lot. Some people like what colour film does to colour, but I like yellow to be yellow (not orange) and blue to be blue (not purple). Digital camera colour is for the most part superior to emulsion, but the detail is nowhere near as good as film, and the artefacts on the limit of detail in digital cause a lot of problems. Need more detail to get the same quality if using pixels rather than stochastically arranged grains.

______

The best feature of shooting black & white is the employment of colour filters to decide what's bright and what's dark.

"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision." - Bertrand Russell

Folks! I've dug out my old SLR and bought a roll of Kodak Tri-X 400 to take some sexy portraits! Questions for the pros here:

-What should I be taking into consideration when shooting if I push it to 3200, in both low-light and daylight conditions? I'd like to shoot as 'off the cuff' as possible, so where's the sweet spot as far as setting up my camera should be? Please, I am a softie noob returning to something I haven't done in 15 years, so go easy!

And if so... any favorite types for shooting in natural light? Have been doing the "shoot film, scan it in" routine, and been trying different types, but nothing I've gotten hooked on. End up doing a ton of color correction no matter what.

Only thing that is consistently "close" to what I want is old slide film (E-6), but it's hard to find and, of course with expired stuff, essentially a gamble each roll.

Color negative is way more forgiving than chrome. I would try Kodak Portra or Fujicolor Pro. Also, a good practice to overexpose color negative by half a stop or so (underexposed c-41 tends to be crap looking).

As for natural light, if you're shooting in shade, you might try a warming filter on the lens, like 81b.

Ferdinand Ulrich wrote:{thread revival!}

Anyone shooting color film 'round here?

And if so... any favorite types for shooting in natural light? Have been doing the "shoot film, scan it in" routine, and been trying different types, but nothing I've gotten hooked on. End up doing a ton of color correction no matter what.

Only thing that is consistently "close" to what I want is old slide film (E-6), but it's hard to find and, of course with expired stuff, essentially a gamble each roll.